We’re rough on jewelry. Admittedly. We don’t lose rings by taking them off. We damage them by wearing them while running a tiller, etc, or by just having the loop wear as a chain slides through.
After nearly six years Jane and I treated ourselves to some repair. I now have my rings wearable again, and am resolved to be kinder to them. Jane has the stag pendant nicely repaired and on a very pretty chain.
Feels nice to have the shinies again.
I feel good too! No polyps! Diverticulitis, but that’s antibiotics, not surgery! 😎
Hooray! After the doctor finishes rummaging about, that’s very good news.
Just remember to keep the shinies far away from industrial equipment 😀
Excellent!
Yeah, I guess, but they took four tries to get the IV inserted! The first three of them hurt and didn’t work to boot! 🙁 🙁
And this was the second go ’round prepping for the thing in as many months. 🙁
I have two first degree relatives with cancer of the colon — tell me about it! Don’t know why they call it Go-Litely, because you don’t!
Mine was a bottle of magnesium citrate to get it started (tasted quite good as these things go), and very pricey Moviprep, pronounced “movie prep”, which pretty much meant one would miss most of the movie! The first tast of that wasn’t bad, but by the end of the litre one never wanted it again–but there was a second litre to come! 🙁 But this worked in spite of the diverticulosis and I didn’t have to go through a third day of prep. 🙂
This was my fourth procedure. It’s “distasteful”, pun very much intended, but given the alternative, there’ll be another in 5 years! Doc says it’s my choice–after 75 other things are more likely to “get” one.
Don’t be put off! The voice of experience says.
I’ve had 4 or 5 of them. After a while you lose count. Everytime, polyps in the same place. The only way to permanently get rid of them would be to remove that section of the colon. My Dad had it twice – colon then ileum.
Back to rings and bling… My wife lost the diamond to her wedding ring in the rose garden. And several others too. I, on the other hand, have a 14 ct ring that has weathered the ages. 24 ct gold is way too soft.
I’ve heard Platinum settings are even better. It has higher ductility under tension than gold, and lower maleability under compression.
My ex-wife’s rings were 90% platinum, 10% iridium……I believe the iridium was more expensive than the total amount of platinum used…..
It’s expensive to mine those asteroids! 😉
Hey, Spence? You and your wife could go for an archaeological dig in the rose garden. Wire mesh sifting through however many cubic feet of mulch and (ouch!) thorns. But think of the remarkable scientific find when (IF) you come across that stray diamond!
If you turn up any other jewelry, that could be even more interesting. Hey, it could happen!
If you both don’t search there, think how excited some future person will be to find an exquisitely cut diamond in the soil!
Hmm, right, I’m not likely making myself popular with you and your wife, am I? 😀
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Some years ago, in this house, or during the move in and back and forth, I lost a very nice turquoise ring that had been a present back when I was in high school. It somehow slipped off. There’s a very small chance it could be in some box somewhere, waiting for me to find it someday. But more likely, it’s just lost. It might, might, also have been lost one day/night while doing cleaning at the new house, including the cats’ litterbox. But if it was indeed lost in the cat litter, I didn’t find it. …Ugh… And I looked, too. (Yeah, the possibility it got clumped into an unidentified lump still aggravates me.) At any rate, the ring disappeared and I didn’t notice it until too late. I went looking and it never turned up. That ring was really beautiful, too, more green than blue, with browns and golds included from oil or gold within the turquoise as it formed, I was told. But it’s been gone many years now, and much missed when I think of it. These things happen.
Someday, wherever that ring landed, probably in a mass of garbage at a landfill outside the city, some future archaeologist will turn up a very fine example of Native American craftsmanship from the late 20th Century. Maybe it’ll end up in a museum or maybe on the archaeologist’s finger. But since I don’t have it, I do hope someone could enjoy it. It was very pretty, handsome.
I managed to lose a ruby set somewhere in the yard of my house in OKC. Sigh. Somewhere, at some future age of the earth, someone’s going to find a nicely faceted fairly good ruby.
My ex-wife lost a 1/2 carat diamond from her engagement ring on Valentine’s Day 2001. Her attitude was, “We’ll just get another.” That kind of hurt….
I lost an opal and sapphire ring when I took it off and it fell on the floor next to the bathroom sink (I thought) while I was pregnant and too tired to bend over and search. It actually fell into the trash can and is now in a dump in Germany unless it is adorning some fraulein’s hand.
CJ, Was the ring that beautiful garnet one with all the different stones and their varied undertones?
I have two rings, both by Darlene Coultrain, the garnet one with multiple stones, each in a different shade; and the other a biwa pearl with a pink sparkle stone beside it. Both were repaired. Jane has picked a silver chain with ‘stevie’s stag’, his totem, a beautiful stag’s head in brass or bronze, and the clasp is a special trinket I got (base metal) from Canterbury Cathedral. I always admired Thomas a Becket for his taking seriously his office, and trying to do right; and so I bought the Canterbury Cross, and wore it for years. It’s really absolutely base metal, which I once had gilded, but it’s lost all the gilt. I’d given it to Jane, who’d thought it interesting. So we needed a good clasp: and the bronze cross now has two rings and serves as the joiner/clasp on a beautiful sparkly silver chain, with the bronze stag as the base of the chain, his worn-through loop now repaired. I had it done it Dodson Jewelers in Spokane, and the one reason I like them is that they take seriously the sentimental value in a piece like the stag and cross, without getting all snobby and trying to sell us something. They treat that tourist cross like the crown jewels, and made a beautiful piece out of two pieces of no economic value, but great sentiment.
At least in ages to come people searching the earth will understand than we loved and appreciated the minerals found in the earth and found ways to make the stones flash and capture light.
A similar story from my grandparents, but with a positive end, but it needs some set-up for non-Dutch, for whom the word Hungerwinter doesn’t immediately tell half the story.
In the winter of 1944-1945 the half of the Netherlands north of the great rivers was still occupied by Germany, and most of the food and practically all the oil and most of the coal was requisitioned, so people were cold and starving, especially in the cities in the west. My mom remembers each child having their own tiny saucer marked with their name, on which each week they got their own weekly ration of 10 grams of butter or fat, which each could decide for themselves how to eat – all at once, one slice of thickly buttered bread, after which the rest of the week you’d have to eat your ‘bread with contentment’ ; or spread it out as long as possible, more like the smell of butter than visible butter on you bread. How my youngest aunt cried when she got an egg to eat, after the war, when she was about four, because she’d never had one and didn’t know the taste. By the end of the winter, people were dining on cooked potato peelings – it’s hard to believe, in a civilised western country in the middle of the twentieth century, but it was a true famine.
My grandma cooked what food they had for the family on a tiny stove my grandpa had made from a tin can, on a few bits of coal when they still had some, or later on a few bits of wood from illegally chopped down public trees (at grandpa’s funeral my uncle told the story of how he carried the ax for his dad when they went out at night to collect wood, because as a child he’d be less likely to be sent to jail if they were found out).
Well, as you can understand everybody was getting very thin that Hungerwinter, and one winter day when scrabling for a few pieces of coal in the dark coalshed, grandma’s wedfing ring slipped off her finger and was lost. They shifted everything in the shed looking for it, but it couldn’t be found.
The next time grandpa walked for days into the countryside looking for farmers who would be willing to (illegally) trade some of their homegrown excess food for jewellery or anything of value, he traded his wedding ring for food, so grandma wouldn’t feel so bad about having lost hers.
But years later, after the war, when the coalshed was torn down and removed, they found grandma’s wedding ring! It had slipped through a crack in the floor.
So that was the story of why grandma always wore a wedding ring, but grandpa didn’t have one.
That’s a lovely story, and one of those that makes it into family lore.
About 15 years ago, I knocked the main set out of my engagement ring while working at the library. I was heartbroken, but had no real hope of finding the stone again and eventually got it replaced. Fast forward three years; I was putting away books and saw a tiny sparkle in a dusty corner of the bottom shelf on the book cart. Lo! It was the missing set from my ring! Since I had already replaced the stone, I kept the loose diamond. The ring may eventually go on to another family member when the time is right. When that happens, I may have the stone reset into a ring or pendant for myself.
A beautiful story. We were not so afflicted in the US in WWII, except that my toys were wooden, made by my father mostly, because even children’s toys were smelted down for metal for the war effort. And when my grandfather was killed, possibly murdered (another story) in Oklahoma, we had to trade gasoline ration cards about to get enough gas to get there and back from Missouri. We in the US have rarely known real deprivation.
Here’s to the recovery of heirlooms and precious things. I know my rings are silly, but they’re a piece of art, a memory of several friends, and I think all such things have a value far beyond the stones and the metal.
I remember seeing a documentary on PBS about health studies of the hunger-winter children–though not the conclusions–just that there were lasting, even second generational, epigenetic, effects.
Yeah, like Iceland does now, it’s a source of good data, well-documented; with both a large and varied test population whose calorie-intake based on the controlled distribution of food is known, and a comparison population of very similar make-up in the already-freed southern half of the country.
From what I read, it changed some things about the way the body handles food, and food shortages. Some of those epigenetic changes increase the person’s aptitude for obesity & their chance for adverse effects on the heart and circulatory system. I don’t remember all of it, but it did make me wonder about some things.For one, the effects on a populace that’s been subjected to fairly regular drought-caused periods of starvation, like what seems endemic in some parts of Africa near the Sahara. The immediate effect of becoming very good at hanging on to every calorie that enters the body is expected, but have they over the centuries adapted to minimize the negative consequences of that initial epigenetic shift?
And how many generations without famine does it take to ‘reset’ these epigenetic changes, or doesn’t it reset at all?
And more personally, if it explains my ability to stay on a 1000-1100 kCal aday diet for 3 years without losing weight beyond the usual 5 kilograms in tge first few months, and my mom’s living for decades on a rusk with tea and a fresh-pressed orange for breakfast, two crackers & 2 pieces of fruit and a small mug of buttermilk for lunch, a green salad, vegerables & <80 grams meat and small bowl of yoghurt for dinner, with 2 small cookies and one chocolate with her (sugarfree) coffee and tea each day, without losing any weight at all – she stays pleasantly plump on that regimen, and gains weight if she eats more; and she's always been quite active and biked a lot. On the other hand, though every dietist tells us this is too lityle and we should eat more, there are lots and lots of women of a certain age who will confirm that they do keep their weight stable on such a minimal diet, and eating more only causes them to gain weight. And thos omen haven't all been through starvation in the womb or in their youth; so maybe the dietists' advice is not calibrated for midlle-aged or menopausal women.
A friend of mine from the Nederlands tells of her mother remembering eating tulips during the war, because of so little proper food.
My step-mother, who was born in Vienna during the war, remembers being sent to a farm in the countryside just after it ended. The farm family were shocked to find her at the pig trough, gorging on the fresh cooked potatoes and milk the pigs were fed!
There are so many people even in our affluent Western countries who themselves remember, or have family and friends who personally remember what living in a war zone was like, or having to flee under fire to a safer country (like my father and his family).
Given that close and personal / family lore knowledge, it is completely unbelievable to me how large parts of our safe countries’ populaces are reacting to the ongoing refugee crises.
Me, it’s reminded of the family lore about being in similar circumstances.
It is very sad, what’s happening. There are a good many mistakes of the last two centuries that are still making people miserable, when all most people want is to have a home and kids in peace.
I agree that the sentiment of jewelry far outshines the value of the metal and stones. My grandmother left a very inexpensive diamond ring to my cousin that was very cherished because of the attachment to the life of our grandmother. And I wore a small, star sapphire ring on a chain from my then girlfriend, now wife, for the two years I lived in Canada before we got married. I would twirl it on my finger when I was pensive.
This winter I finally got my act together or, rather, my stash of this necklace without a clasp, that favorite bracelet without a loop, etc. and brought them, along with my mother’s broken string of rose quartz beads, and brought them in to E B Horns Jewelers in downtown Boston (est. 1839). I must say they were excellent. A few pieces that just needed a hook or clasp they fixed right then and there for the cost of the part (the short gold chain my Dad had given me I think when I turned 13) and several others they sent off to be repaired or restrung, such as the silver, Art Deco necklace with a carnelian pendant my grandfather gave my grandmother and she gave to me when I graduated from high school. I remember her scolding me for wearing it casually out in the yard… and realized how much that gift symbolized for her. After getting it mended I wore it happily and reminiscently out of the store, reaching up to touch it often and say Hi to my Grandma.
Good for the two of you, treating your selves and your jewelry to some tender, loving care!
Apropos of nothing else (other than repeating a sentiment I’m sure CJ & Jane approve of):
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20160422